Preface
Josef Suk was a renowned violinist and one of the most important Czech composers of the generation to follow Antonín Dvorák (1841–1904). He grew up in the Bohemian city of Krecowitz where his father, also named Josef Suk (1827–1913), was choirmaster and with whom the younger Suk studied violin, piano and organ. Entering the Prague Conservatory at the age of 11, Suk studied violin with Antonín Bennewitz (1833–1926) and composition with Dvorák. Suk was Dvorák’s favorite student and eventually ended up marrying the latter’s daughter Otylka (1878–1905). In 1891 Suk, along with Karel Hoffman (1872–1936), Oskar Nedbal (1874–1930), and Otto Berger (1873–1897), founded the Czech String Quartet, which remained in existence with relatively few personnel changes until 1933. During his 40 years with the ensemble Suk performed in over 4000 concerts internationally. The composer’s travels had a profound impact on his evolving compositional style due to exposure to a wide variety of new music. The Czech Quartet also performed much new music and was the ensemble that gave the premiere performances of Leos Janaceks (1854–1928) Quartets No. 1 (Kreutzer Sonata) and No. 2 (Intimate Letters).

Given Suk’s prominence as a chamber performer, it is surprising that he was almost exclusively a composer of symphonic music. In addition, unlike his fellow contemporary Czech composers, Suk was relatively little interested in folk music. Suk’s compositional style was highly eclectic and unique, demonstrating influences from as far afield as Dvorák, Bedrich Smetana (1824–1884), Claude Debussy (1862–1918) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949). In his later works, Suk’s harmonies become so complex that they even approach Stravinskian bi-tonality. Suk’s compositional oeuvre includes two symphonies and several overtures, piano miniatures, several string quartets, piano trios and related works, and a number of choruses and solo songs. Although he composed no operas, Suk’s incidental music to Julius Zeyer’s (1841–1901) play Radúz and Mahulena was highly regarded for its pathos and introspective nature.

Although Suk left behind a healthy corpus of musical compositions, his death at the relatively young age of 61 and his time-consuming performance schedule undoubtedly prevented the completion of many compositional projects. Added to the restraints on Suk’s time was his appointment as professor of composition at the Prague Conservatory in 1922 and his later serving as rector at the same institution. Among Suk’s composition students were Bohuslav Martinu (1890–1959) and Karel Reiner (1910–1979). Suk’s grandson, also named Josef Suk (b. 1929), has been one of the most renowned violinists of the past century.
Suk’s second symphony in C minor is generally regarded as his masterpiece and is a work of Mahlerian density and Straussian harmonic and motivic complexity. The work is subtitled Asrael in reference to the angel of from Muslim mythology who was allegedly responsible for separating souls from their bodies. The work was motivated by two tragic events in Suk’s life: the death in 1904 of his mentor and father-in-law Dvorák; and the subsequent death only 14 months later of his wife Otylka. Suk had begun to compose the piece as a memorial to Dvorák when his wife died while he was completing the fourth movement. This necessitated an alteration in his conception of the work (in particular, the addition of a fifth movement) since it was now a memorial to the two most important persons in his life. The symphony was completed during the summer of 1906 and received its premiere in Prague in February of 1907 with Karel Kovarovice conducting. Prior to Asrael, Suk’s style had been notable for its graceful fluency and lightness of spirit. After Asrael, Suk’s music steadily obtained gravitas and complexity.

The work is divided into two sections, with the initial containing the first three movements and the second section containing the last two movements both of which are adagios. Starting off almost imperceptibly in the timpani and basses, Suk engages in motivic development in the style of the late German Romantics. References are made throughout to Dvorák’s Requiem and to Suk’s own earlier composition, Radúz and Mahulena. The latter work was particularly important as a source of thematic material since it was incidental music to a play about a young couple deeply in love, an obvious allusion to the intense love that Suk felt for his recently departed young wife.

In measure 24 of movement one, ‘Andante sostenuto’, we have the first instance of what has come to be known as the ‘death motif’ of the symphony—an ascending tritone immediately followed a whole step higher by a descending tritone. This motif will reoccur throughout the symphony and even begins the fifth and final lugubrious movement. Suk is here utilizing the tritone in its medieval musico-rhetorical guise as the ‘diabolus in musica‘ (‘devil in music’), an apt appropriation for a symphony dealing with death. From a compositional standpoint, however, the inherent harmonic instability implied by the tritone as a motif is an important factor in the organic growth of the symphony as a whole.

The second movement, ‘Andante’, finds the semitone as the agent of its motivic development. It is also in this movement that Suk makes his most conspicuous quotation from Dvorák’s Requiem. The third movement, ‘Vivace’, is clearly influenced by Pyotr Caikovskijs’s (1840–1893) scherzi, and indeed, a case can be made concerning the overall design of Asrael for the influence of the Russian composer’s Pathétique (1893) with its scherzo preceding a mournful concluding adagio movement.

The fourth movement, ‘Adagio’, was dedicated to Suk’s wife and is supposed to be reflective of the composer’s deep passion for his beloved Otylka. Although the movement is in A flat major, it is constantly shifting to the parallel minor. This is evocative of the emotional torment that Suk was experiencing during the composition of the symphony. The movement ends with a sustained A flat minor chord, in essence, a reverse tierce de Picardie.
The fifth and final movement, ‘Adagio e maestoso’, begins with the ‘death motif’ stated solo in the timpani. The overall harmonic plan is the reverse of that of the preceding movement. After the introduction, the fifth movement proceeds in C minor and eventually ends with a sustained C major chord.

What is remarkable about Asrael is that Suk managed in a completely instrumental setting to convey an entire gamut of emotions ranging from profound grief to evocations of lost love to the stoic acceptance of death. This was accomplished almost exclusively through the emotional intensity of the music and not through the use of extra-musical rhetorical devices. There is, for instance, no quotation of the Dies irae melody or other instantly recognizable motifs that conjure up images of death. For a symphony composed on such a grand Mahlerian scale there is a remarkable amount of non-Mahlerian subtlety at play.

Although infrequently performed today, Asrael was an important musical work in the life of the Czech Republic between the First and Second World Wars and was performed regularly during periods of mourning and state funerals. Asrael was so well known at the time that other composers could use quotations from it in their own works and expect audiences to catch the reference. The most notable example of this is found in the Czech composer Viktor Ullmann’s (1898–1944) opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (1943) in which the double tritone ‘death motif’ begins the work and is utilized as a leitmotif throughout. In this opera the Asrael ‘death motif’ was given a referential importance equal to, it not greater than, other quoted materials used by Ullmann, including parodic versions of the Protestant chorale ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ and the anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.

In many ways Asrael has served as a patriotic rallying point for the Czech people during dark decades of political subjugation. In this sense there is an extra-musical importance to the work that far transcends even the profound emotions of loss that were its original inspiration. Like Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude for the Poles, Asrael has served at times as a substitute national anthem for the Czechs when overt expressions of national pride and patriotism were politically impossible.

Several significant recordings of Asrael have been produced over the years, especially Libor Pesek’s conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in 1990 (Virgin Classics), and an extremely moving rendition conducted by Vaclav Talich with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in 1952 (Supraphon).